Giornale Adriatico-Mediterraneo VII: Assisi

photograph by Hallie Cohen

The seeds of Renaissance were planted in Assisi. One of Giotto’s frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi literally shows the founder of an order based on its vows of poverty, holding up the church. If you believe there’s a God given order to life, you might say that the advent of Francis and the Franciscans was the way things were meant to be. Or you could look at it as matter of historical necessity or a product of human evolution. The net result was the democratization of deity. You might say that Francis’ contribution to Catholicism was tantamount to Copernicus’ understanding of the solar system. Both challenged the current conceptions of man’s place in the universe. Within two years after Francis’s death painters were flocking to Assisi and supplanting images of Christ with the human being who’d become a saint. Giotto depicts Francis with a halo; at the time an image like Saint Francis feeding birds must have been as radical a statement in terms of artistic and religious iconography as say Last Tango whose revolutionary impact Pauline Kael once compared to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The history of sensibility is rather dramatic and what was revolutionary in the 13^th century is a far cry from what is going to make waves seven centuries later—though one can argue that Bertolucci like St. Francis was also exploring the nature of faith. Assisi is a tourist mecca filled with the usual reproductions and trinkets, which are an affront to everything Francis stood for.  But walk into the The Basilica of St. Claire named after the famed female compatriot of Francis and see her image to one of side of the crucifixion with that of Francis kissing Christ’s feet. Then walk out to see the vista where still sits the diminutive Porziuncola, the  church that Francis once occupied within the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli  If one of the most important aspects of Renaissance art was perspective, you’ll begin to get a feeling for the power of an idea whose time has come.

Pornosophy: Ten Sex Clubs Where You Can Redeem Your Rewards Points

There's obviously nothing unusual about credit cards being used in sex clubs and lap dancing establishments. That's in fact how most of these businesses make their profits. The customer gets inebriated and the sky or his credit ceiling is the limit. How many purveyors of credit card sex wish the day after that they had not had their cards so readily available? But what about the sex tourist with a good business sense, the kind who is level-headed enough to use his or her rewards points to pay for their transactions? One of the most common ways of using rewards points is for air travel. Accumulate enough points and you can buy your tickets to Paris, Rome or even a sex capital like Bangkok. But once you have arrived the trick is to find the kind of lap dancing establishments, massage parlors and brothels where you can use your rewards points to buy foreplay or even intercourse. The question is can you reap a real reward for your rewards points and if in the moment of passionate lust, you have the wherewithal to defer your reward so that you can make a financially sound decision that will not exhaust the budget. How many sex tourists would have been spared credit card debt if they had had the presence of mind to employ this version of coitus interruptus? Sure they might drain their rewards point accounts to the point where it will be a long time before they’re flying, but the experience will undoubtedly produce its own high. Imagine a hypothetical list of ten new sex clubs where rewards points can be exchanged for sex. The first would be Last Tango in Paris’s Second Arrondissement. There for 1,000, 000 rewards points you’d be able to relive the famous butter scene from the Bertolucci classic.